Chris Valentine, the event’s producer, says that social Web businesses are still king–200 companies applied to compete, and there were twice as many in the social media category as in any other. But he’s starting to see a shift in the technology behind the companies involved in the event. “We knew we were going in the direction of artificial intelligence,” Valentine says, and this year there are a number of startups harnessing technology from the field–especially natural language processing and computer vision.

A prime example is Siri, a startup that launched this February. The company was spun out of SRI International, a research organization based in Menlo Park, CA, commercializing technology developed as part of the CALO artificial intelligence project. The company offers a virtual personal assistant with impressive voice recognition, learning capabilities, and the capacity to interact with many different apps. Its founders describe Siri as “the mother of all mashups with a big brain in the front.”